#venus project

Jesus H. Fuck Me Where You Ain’t Supposed’ta and Make Me Say Thanks!

Thissss…is a frickin hard pill to swallow…

This is not political. This is a documentary that goes beyond politics.

I’ll come right out and say it. This movie uncovers the root of our society’s problem, and it also reveals the answer. The trouble is that most people couldn’t even get past the first section of this documentary without crying foul. So if you’re religious, strongly political, or not up-to-speed with advancements in technology you will either dismiss this entirely or not be able to “buy in” to the solution. If you’re one of the first two, honestly, I’d suggest you don’t bother watching this. Religious people won’t be able to accept the fist part, and strongly political people won’t be able to accept the second. If you’re not strongly political, there’s a chance this can reach you. And if you’re neither of the first two but are the third (naïve to advancements in technology) you’ll likely think the solution is just science fiction. Honestly, I can hardly believe we’re advanced enough to get it done.... I know we are... It’s just hard to fully picture.

Zeitgeist: A word that essentially means “what’s popularly believed to be true is accepted by society as the truth.”

If everyone thinks it’s true, it must be, right?

Yeah... Not so much.

I’m gonna skip talking about most of it and just move to something we can all relate to:

Money.

So the repugnant truth of money today is utterly fucking insane… Here’s the gist:

When you go to a bank to get a loan, that bank loans you what they think you can payback + interest, right? Seems simple enough. Seems fair. And it would be, except that they don’t actually ever deduct any money from their reserve to give you. They simply figure “Hey, she’s gonna give it back anyway, so why bother subtracting it from our reserve?” So what they’re actually giving you is a “note of their liability for it” (and I’m not that educated on this so my banking jargon might be wrong) And that says: “this is worth this much because we have that amount in our reserve.” But the trouble is, if you can’t pay that loan back, what happens? They take your home or assets or whatever, right? But, wait…they never deducted the money from their reserve to start. They just gave you a piece of paper stating that they loaned you this promissory amount and that, if the shit hits the fan, they’re “good for it.”

So here’s the math: They have a cool mil in the reserve, right? They sign a note saying they’re loaning you 100k. They give you that note, but the mil still sits in their reserve. So now there’s a mil in the reserve, plus this “promissory note” out and about “worth” 100k. So now, clerically, there’s 1.1 mil in our society just because they’re assuming they’ll get it back from you. They just made 100k out of thin air on the grounds that they’ll get it back later. And this isn’t even the mind fuck of it all. The mind fuck is when you realize the same thing occurs on the scale of our entire society. People think the Federal Reserve is owned by the government. It’s not. It’s just another bank, man. They LEND money to the government with interest whenever the government needs it. But where did that money come from that they lent? Youuuu guessed it! From book-keeping, not from the vault. And, to top it off they tack on that interest so the governemnt owes more in return than was even made, so....huh? How can you pay back money that doesn’t even exist? That amount owed was never made so can only be repaid if you take someone else’s.

The only way debts can be paid is by bankrupting someone else. (Or simply getting a bit here and there from radom sources, but eventually, down the line, someone has to go broke for some else’s debt to be paid. This is cyclically destructive and CAN NOT WORK.

And it is also what’s well known as a Pyramid Scheme…

...which is illegal...

And our whole. Fucking. Economy, is based on it (as is most of the world’s because this is now how banking is done everywhere.)

This documentary goes SOOO much deeper into the problems that the monetary system creates and why it will never work. And after they entirely fuck your world six ways from Sunday with the horrifying corruption of it all…they show us that there is another way...

It’s called The Venus Project (and no, it isn’t suggesting we move to Venus and start over). And if you’re interested in this “other way,” but are religious or strongly political, I suggest you skip this documentary and just go right to looking into the solution. Remember: this documentary isn’t political at all. It’s beyond politics. If offers solutions, not new laws.

Now, if you’re a Trekkie, you’ll be able to picture the solution much easier than those who aren’t because this is basically Star Trek but now (minus the interplanetary travel and the “Beam me up, Scotty!”). The Venus Project explains exactly how we can actually become a civilized society instead of just pretending we’re one. This solution will solve 95% of society’s problems including crime, war, poverty, public health; and then will go on to solve problems on a more individual level such as greed, racism, ignorance, and sooo much more. This honestly is the answer. The problem is that we’re all so conditioned to believe the world is the way that it is because it has to be (a zeitgeist) that we can’t believe this can be true.

Well, believe it. It can be true. There can be a world without greed and corruption. But first we have to understand why those things exist (and no, it’s not human nature as the system would have you believe so that you keep working within it). Once we understand that, we see the solution as plain as a beautiful hope-filled day.

Note: If you’re not particularly religious but are spiritual, this will be fine for you (other than the egregious fuck-tastrophe we’re in the center of that it reveals. Be warned: the truth is beyond upsetting; it’s sickeningly unbelievable. But “not liking it” doesn’t make it false.)

That being said, this cosmic truth should not be used to victim-blame or to implicitly justify the status quo. Many “new age” practitioners have absorbed an insulated neoliberalism into their advocacy, telling others that they are 100% responsible for their station in life and that they just need to project “positive vibes” to escape poverty and hardship. This is the toxic ideology of capitalism, furnished with a pseudo-spiritual gloss — literally, it’s a stone’s throw away from the language of GOP politicians and right-wing libertarian manifestos.

We live in a world that is far from the spiritual ideal, filled to the brim with oppression, competition, and environmental destruction. Class society positions the few above the many, maintained through their systematic control over the sources of life — the natural resources, the workplaces, the housing, etc. Capitalism in particular turns us into atomized individuals in a sea of competition — we compete for jobs, compete for social capital, compete for friends and lovers, compete for life itself. How any pantheist can support this system is beyond me.

If all people are equal representations of “God”, it stands to reason that our social systems ought to be as horizontal and classless as possible; inequalities of resources and authority are a sharp deviation from cosmic truth and they prevent vast numbers of the population from being able to self-actualize (and thus “All-actualize”). If our natural environment is one and the same as us, it stands to reason that ecology ought to take center stage in our social/economic/political concerns; an extractive system founded upon infinite growth is not only the ego illusion gone mad in a theoretical sense (unaccountable elites chasing profit for their own sake), it’s also destroying the planet.

You can claim that it’s possible for people to rise above their conditions and find spiritual peace or whatever, but that ignores reality. We are influenced by our environments immensely and a person whose needs are met is far better equipped to contemplate the mysteries of the universe than someone who struggles to survive. People who struggle to survive are made hyper-aware of the “ego-illusion”, precisely because their destitute conditions force them to be. Note, for example, how all those famous Greek philosophers were guys who generally had their needs met, who could sit around and debate while a population of slaves generated what society needed to function. These days especially, we don’t need to divide the human population into masters and servants — we have the technology and resources to provide for everyone and liberate them from a life of grinding toil for the sake of some CEO’s bottom line. Wellbeing is possible for all of us; we just need to escape a cultural and economic narrative that demands human needs be subservient to capital accumulation and profit margins.

Pantheists, hippies, and psychonauts who refuse to align themselves politically (and there’s unfortunately a lot of them these days) are not seeing the bigger picture. There is a history of ostensibly left-wing resistance to authority structures among these groups, with debatable results, but the great majority of it has been drained of bite since the 1980s, a byproduct of neoliberalism and cultural individualism. The link needs to be reestablished. This isn’t about rigid black-and-white dogma; it’s about recognizing that our future is bound up in the establishment of a new egalitarian social system, a society founded upon interconnection that provides everyone with the right “set and setting” to maximize their potential and realize their place in the universe. If people are concerned about some of the traditional connotations of the socialist left, then I’d recommend these philosophies and outlets: solarpunk, social ecology, libertarian socialism, ecosocialism, green anarchism, Films for Action, Sustainable Human, the Zeitgeist Movement, the Venus Project. These all have anti-capitalist and anti-hierarchy ideas that are perfect for those aforementioned pantheists, hippies, and psychonauts.

(And even then, I strongly encourage the people who look up those ideologies and outlets to still remain open to looking into labor history and the socialist left itself. There’s a lot of anti-socialist propaganda out there, largely disseminated by capitalist states and their wealthy cronies, so I don’t want potential allies distancing themselves from the organized left over some presumed understanding of what socialists themselves advocate. There have definitely been unsavory things done in the name of socialism, but there have also been plenty of unsavory things done in the name of freedom — and curiously I don’t see anti-socialists clamoring to abolish freedom. Socialism’s core principles have always been focused around democratic control of the workplaces and resources society needs to function and granting people control over the spaces and decisions that impact them — very much in line with each of those supposedly non-socialist ideologies and outlets I listed above. This is what the socialist left fights for.)

We lost a legend on Thursday. If you are not aware of the life’s work of Jacque Fresco, you must look him up now! I hope that someday we are able to evolve and progress closer to Jacque’s wonderful vision of a future on earth. Rest in peace, good sir, and thank you for all of the talents you have shared with us humans.